Global flow of glasma in high energy nuclear collisions

作者：Chen Guangyao; Fries Rainer J^*

来源：Physics Letters B, 2013, 723(4-5): 417-421.

DOI：10.1016/j.physletb.2013.05.031

• Quantum chromodynamics
• Color glass condensate
• Heavy ion collisions

We discuss the energy flow of the classical gluon fields created in collisions of heavy nuclei at collider energies. We show how the Yang-Mills analog of Faraday's Law and Gauss' Law predicts the initial gluon flux tubes to expand or bend. The resulting transverse and longitudinal structure of the Poynting vector field has a rich phenomenology. Besides the well-known radial and elliptic flow in transverse direction, classical quantum chromodynamics predicts a rapidity-odd transverse flow that tilts the fireball for non-central collisions, and it implies a characteristic flow pattern for collisions of non-symmetric systems A + B. The rapidity-odd transverse flow translates into a directed particle flow v(1) which has been observed at RHIC and LHC. The global flow fields in heavy ion collisions could be a powerful check for the validity of classical Yang-Mills dynamics in high energy collisions.

• 出版日期2013-6-25